Paulo Nuin

I thought about doing a colony counter for the G1 ... point it a plate , click and get a the number of colonies. This could be handy :) - Pedro Beltrao

Mobile versions of commonly-used websites: NCBI databases, BLAST, PDB etc? - Neil Saunders

Like Pedro's idea too. A common complaint about electronic lab notebooks is that people in the lab do not record data at a computer - so why not transmit to the ELN via phone? Better still, have the instruments tweet to the ELN :-) - Neil Saunders

a ncbi, pubmed search? - Paulo Nuin

Pedro's idea++. However, I don't really see a reasonable workflow with mobile versions of NCBI or BLAST on the iPhone. - Daniel Jurczak

Neil, Paulo, Daniel, have you seen this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed... ? It's from 2001 :) - Pawel Szczesny

Would there have to be one? (Or am I just narrow-minded here? Hope not...) The colony counter makes sense, but there's no real added value in blast or ncbi on a mobile phone, is there? It'd really have to be an app that leverages the fact that it can be carried around. So maybe as an input portal for your labjournal (notes, photos). - Jan Aerts

I don't know about bioinformatics, but biology could sure benefit from a killer lab timer. :-) - Danielle Fong

Would any aspect of bioinformatics benefit from being made mobile at all? Maybe a service that could check in on the progress of molecular dynamics calculations or something? - Mr. Gunn

Yes, it has to be said that most bioinformaticians are rarely away from a computer long enough to require mobile access :-) - Neil Saunders

@Pawel nice link. I will check it out. - Paulo Nuin

@Neil: may I guess where you have lunch? - Paulo Nuin

the monitoring visualization bits are relatively east ESP with a full featured browser. I love the colony idea. In a lab finding a sample by taking a picture of the bar code (for the g1) or using the phone as some sort of controller - Deepak Singh